We've Been Pronouncing IKEA Wrong This Whole Time And No One Bothered To Tell Us

May 24th, 2016​

﻿No one ever taught us how to say IKEA, we just kind of always knew how to say it. It was how our mothers said it, and their mothers before them. Well mother, and mothers before you, you were wrong. We were all wrong. Decades, if not millennia, have passed with the name IKEA and pronunciation “Eye-Key-Yah” being handed down from generation to generation as a staple of every household that possessed infuriatingly difficult-to-construct bookcases and bed frames

The Swedish furniture mega-store is not pronounced Eye-Key-Yah. It is pronounced EE- kay- Yah.

Whoa.

Apparently, when the Swedish store opened in the United States for the first time, it was predicted that Americans would automatically assume it was pronounced with the “eye” sound rather than the “ee” sound. So basically, we’ve been pronouncing IKEA wrong for 30 years and the Swedish were too kind to correct us so they kind of just rolled with it.​